18 novembre 2011

"Overlong" Entertainment

Boredom is a subjective perception, and often deceiving.

Spectators who complain about the length of a movie, only stigmatize the run time when the content is not stimulating enough for the limitation of their attention span. They never complain about the same characteristic (duration) in an exciting ENTERTAINMENT movie. So many of the most popular/successful movies exceed the standard duration established by exhibitors in Hollywood and the Western world (90 minutes), and thus for quite a long time. Let alone the standard duration in Bollywood (closer to 150 minutes, although revised to 110 in recent years). The following examples in this list are not experimental works or obscur artfilms by Tarr Béla or Lav Diaz... they are all commercial movies for a mainstream audience, and ranked in IMDb's top1000. Except for Fanny and Alexander, and The Best of Youth (TV episodes released in theatre; the 2 highest dots on the graph), all are feature length movies with a commercial theatrical release. Some of them are animation for children (Fantasia, Cars, Spirited Away...)! or Teen flicks (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribean...) If children can take a movie longer than 2h, I would expect adults (who happen to work for the NYT) to be able to handle it too without whining like babies in front a broccoli.

A long movie is just not that odd! And not even in domain of the highest-grossing BO blockbusters. It's not rare, boring or unpopular!

Keeping this in mind, now reconsider the reasons why you reject "slowish artfilms" and CCC... It's not because of their duration, which rarely reach the epic length of a Harry Potter movie. You're just addicted, conditioned to constant nagging stimulation, and lost any reasonable sense of the passing time when it does not beat to the rhythmic cuts and punchlines. This is your problem, a problem of the audience in general in this day and age. Not the problem of a cinema that operates in different waters, nowhere out of reach, nowhere inaccessible to the common man's physiological abilities... but in a space where a greater deal of concentration is required to keep out of your mind the idea to look up your smartphone.

Mainstream entertainment movies longer than 120 minutes (incomplete selection, emphasized after 1994 to compare with CCC; longest runtime version available for each title):

"What constitutes an acceptable standard length (of an album, a movie comedy, a movie drama, a reality TV series, a play, and so on), and why?We bounce some ideas around — a "two hour rule," thoughts on iTunes vs. CDs, The Hobbit and its appendices, varying belief systems with regard to skimming and fast-forwarding, the final season(s) of Breaking Bad, something about a four-hour adaptation of Hamlet — while also giving me the flimsiest excuse yet to bust out a halfhearted Gordon Ramsay impersonation."Pop Culture Happy Hour: How Long Is Too Long? (NPR; 2012) 38'30"